Art Metropole

#05281

Sonic Somatic: Performances of the Unsound Body

Date

2012

Publisher

Optica

Format

Artists' Books

ISBN

0-9680629-in

Size

20 × 20 × 0.5 cm

Length

0 

In Sonic Somatic, the sound artist and theorist Christof Migone looks at sound art’s overlap with other disciplines through its particular uses of articulation. Articulation is explored here in all of its guises: its negation as silence, its interruption in stuttering and its somatic ramifications in the human body. Migone looks at French playwright and poet Antonin Artaud’s writings, with their implications of strangled speech and glossolalia; American composer Alvin Lucier’s groundbreaking 1969 recording “I Am Sitting in a Room”; Erik Satie’s looped composition “Vexations”; Marina Abramovic’s confrontational performance “Rhythm 0”; Adrian Piper’s “Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City”; Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener”; Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson’s documentary film First Contact; and of course the work that most looms over this topic: John Cage’s paradigm-shifting 1952 composition “4’33” .”